Behind The Scenes: Cake Advert

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Our Cake advert features two big stars, our precious Phil and birthday girl, Audrey. Despite Audrey’s comic reaction to Phil bursting out of her birthday cake, she is in fact a BIG ‘Phan’ (see what we did there). It wasn’t really her birthday but when she met Phil, she said she felt like all her birthdays had come at once.

To make sure Phil’s big entrance was as dramatic as possible, the production crew had to build the custom-made cake around Phil. The icing on the cake was a sheet of polystyrene, drilled in place ready for Phil to make his big entrance. To get the perfect take, Phil burst through the cake a grand total of 30 times, he really is a hero.

Cake: In The Making

From the idea conception to shoot day, lots of planning takes place to refine the advert concept. The team considered a number of different scenarios for the cake ad, the finalised ad you see on your TVs went through months of planning and perfecting. To illustrate the ideas as they develop, the drawings you see below were created to help the team visualise what the future ads might look like. You might only find one of the faces below familiar, Phil’s, of course! This is because at the time these drawings were produced, the talent for the advert hadn’t yet been cast. We know the drawing of Audrey isn’t a like-for-like, but what can we say, we just hadn’t met her yet! You should recognise some of the scenes from the final cake advert, if not the faces, we love the awkward Phil popping out of the cake.

To your left you will see Phil and Audrey starring in the final version of our Cake advert. The 30-second advert you see, took around eight hours to shoot, and 30 re-constructed cake tops for Phil to burst through. We had a lot of extras on set for the filming of Cake, including half a dozen children, who you can spot sitting neatly around the edges of the stage. It took months of planning and post-production to produce the advert and we’d like to give a special shout out to all the wonderful people who helped to create it. We hope it brings a smile to your face.

We’re proud to have partnered with master bakers, CakeFlix, to reproduce our Cake advert, in real cake, including a sugar model of TV star, Phillip Schofield. You can check out the highlights of how to make the cake yourself in this ten minute highlights video.